"Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dostoevsky Fyodor)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT


by FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY



Translated By
Constance Garnett



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to
understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-
working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with
their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent
their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from
books of a serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the
final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he
had already begun his first work, "Poor Folk."

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was
received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself
instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career
seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849
he was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist,
Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to
read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of "taking part in
conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from
Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a
printing press." Under Nicholas I. (that "stern and just man," as
Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to
death. After eight months' imprisonment he was with twenty-one others
taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother
Mihail, Dostoevsky says: "They snapped words over our heads, and they
made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death.
Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution.